Amnesiac | Review

Before I Go to Steal: Polish’s Familiar, Bare Bones Genre Trick

It isn’t long after the film’s opening car crash sequence that the essence of Amnesiac comes grinding to an equally violent narrative standstill. The first of his three features set for theatrical release in 2015, director Michael Polish utilizes the blonde iciness of his actress/wife Kate Bosworth for a genre film duplicating the formulas of so many more infamous staples nearly every beat seems lodged in mundane presumptions. Unless audience members are suffering from the same condition promised in the title, there’s nothing remotely fresh or intriguing concerning this kidnapping thriller and its countless moments of generic flourishes.

A man (Wes Bentley) and wife (Bosworth) get into a car accident. He wakes up in their large home filled with mostly empty rooms to find he remembers nothing about or before the accident. He no longer recognizes his wife, a caretaker who informs him with painstaking details about the life he’s forgotten. Yet something doesn’t seem quite right about the situation and he’s not sure he believes she’s who she says she is. As he makes his suspicions evident, his wife is forced to contain him until he sees reason.

Filmed with a washed out glow by Jayson Crothers, which gives it a sort of dusty, antique vibe, the film positions itself as a period piece fascinated with mutated, feminine ideals of familial fantasy. As such, it very much feels like one of those misogynistic cheapies from a bygone era. Bosworth’s one-note, preternaturally calculated antagonist seems about as silly as a character from a William Castle schlockfest, something like the sensationalized Homicidal (1961), for instance. For every grisly action, her character follows it with an informational tidbit about some banal factoid, which is less irritating than when she’s uttering other presentiments with soothing nonchalance, like “do you know anything about shock therapy?” when her husband has acted untowardly.

Just as Castle was blatantly ripping off Psycho, Polish seems inclined to give us his own dialed down version of Misery, positioning a pretty surgical nurse as the type of woman whose affections are her love object’s worst nightmare. We’ll give Polish the benefit of the doubt and assume he missed out on the Colin Firth/Nicole Kidman flick Before I Go To Sleep (2014) from Rowan Joffe, but again, the plot points with this earlier title are eerily similar. But while that film features a big twist concerning its spousal presumptions, we’re basically made aware from its opening sequences that something isn’t quite right about the relationship between Bentley and Bosworth.

But the twist in store for us isn’t any less superfluous and meaningless than the rest of this tiredly familiar film, relayed with dreadful heavy-handedness in Amy Kolquist and Mike Le’s screenplay. Poor Shawshawnee Hall, credited as the ‘detective,’ is one of the few supporting players suffering from the lack of research evident in the presentation of their occupations. Seen fleetingly in bitchy snippets, uttering lines like “I am up out of my chair. This had better be important,” in regards to a missing police officer, his portrayal of law enforcement is dealt with as effectively as character actor Richard Riehle’s ‘postman,’ a man handed a fate similar to one of a colleague in Spider Baby (1967). Though killing a postal service employee delivering a piece of registered mail that makes his death seems rather ill-provoked.

Basically, there’s somewhat of an idea behind Amnesiac’s madness but sitting through its presentation seems more an errand than entertainment.

★/☆☆☆☆☆